The buoyancy organelles of aquatic microorganisms have to meet stringent specifications: allowing gases to equilibrate freely across the proteinaceous shell, preventing the condensation of water vapor inside the hollow cavity and resisting collapse under hydrostatic pressures that vary with column depth. These properties are provided by the 7- to 8-kDa gas vesicle protein A (GvpA), repeats of w...

The genus Halorubrum is a member of the family Halobacteriaceae which currently has the highest number of described species (31) of all the haloarchaea. Here we report the draft genome sequence of strain V5, a new species within this genus that was isolated from the solar salterns of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. Assembly was performed and rendered the genome into 17 contigs (N50 = 515,834 bp), the l...

To contribute to the understanding of deep-sea planktonic communities, we explored the prokaryotic diversity of a 3000 m deep site at the Antarctic Polar Front using molecular methods. Bacterial 16S rDNA-amplified sequences corresponded to the as yet uncultivated groups SAR11, within the alpha-Proteobacteria, and SAR324, within the delta-Proteobacteria, as well as to the gamma-Proteobacteria, C...

Virus-prokaryote interactions were investigated in four natural sites in Senegal (West Africa) covering a salinity gradient ranging from brackish (10‰) to near salt saturation (360‰). Both the viral and the prokaryote communities exhibited remarkable differences in their physiological, ecological and morphological traits along the gradient. Above 240‰ salinity, viral and prokaryotic abundance i...

Ford Doolittle grew up in Urbana, Illinois, and obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees, respectively, at Harvard and Stanford (the latter with Charley Yanofsky). After a postdoc with Norm Pace, he moved to Canada, taking a position at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He has been there ever since, for the last 17 years as a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Directo...